The ‘Farmer’ Google Update – Weeding out Content Farms

Prakash RangarajanMarch 3, 2011

The recent Google Algorithmic update (starting with the US index), a week back, popularly known as “The Farmer Google Update” promises to do away with low quality sites, content scrapers, content aggregators that don’t add value to a healthy web ecosystem. This would also mean sites with original content buffeted by unique perspectives, deep analysis and useful takeaways will always achieve higher rankings in the long run, providing a better Google search experience for the end user.

The Official Google Blog reveals

Many of the changes we make are so subtle that very few people notice them. But in the last day or so we launched a pretty big algorithmic improvement to our ranking—a change that noticeably impacts 11.8% of our queries.

It is a no-brainer that a number of offending sites would get hit. Quite a few domains have dropped from top 10 positions, though their site profiles mean that the definition of content farms needs to have a broader latitude as can be seen from this insights report from seoClarity.

There have been some reports of collateral damage for legit sites though as Google Fellow Amit Singhal has admitted to wired that “no algorithm is 100 percent accurate” and says that Google is working on a “new layer” to improve it as can be possibly done.